Cloud Expo Silicon Valley – Big Data: How to Deploy a Solution

Some people have some BIG ideas about what Big Data is, but let’s take a minute to look at the BIG picture. Let’s take a BIG step back and talk about where Big Data really makes sense. Where do Big Data solutions fit vs traditional RDBMS solutions? What are the best deployment strategies? How can you deploy a working Big Data solution to hit the BIG Time?
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Harold Hannon, Sr. Software Architect at SoftLayer Technologies, will cover techniques on deploying your own Big Data solutions in the cloud, managed data layer offerings like Cloudant, and preview a BIG exciting new Big Data offering strategy from SoftLayer.

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Europe’s New Cloud Computing Strategy

Europe’s Commissioner for the Digital Agenda has released a communication called “Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe” mapping how the cloud fits into Europe’s future.
The paper outlines a series of actions designed to drive European businesses and the public sector into the cloud, according to the HuffingtonPost.com. The goal is to create 2.5 million new European jobs and boost GDP in the single market to 160 billion euros by 2020.
The potential benefits of cloud computing are growing ever more clear, the study says. It promises to accelerate digital commerce and make robust technology solutions available to more users with greater cost efficiencies than ever before. It will increase flexibility and productivity, especially for small and midsize enterprises, and help with the delivery of public services in Europe and around the world.

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Wal-Mart Reportedly Using OpenStack & Rackspace

Wal-Mart, which practically invented Big Data analysis to unseemly good advantage, is reportedly consolidating its disparate data analytics systems into one global system and bringing in OpenStack and its mentor Rackspace Hosting to help develop the platform.
At least that’s what investment house William Blair’s analyst Jim Breen said Wednesday, tickling Rackspace’s stock.
He thinks Rackpace will get more business from the retail giant as the WalmartLabs, Wal-Mart’s Big Data division, builds out the new platform.
Maybe Rackspace will say something about when it reports its Q3 results next month.

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Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Driving Innovation Through the Cloud

Big Data. Social. Mobile. These worldwide trends are sparking new cloud-based applications and driving innovation around the next generation of open, web-based services development. This tectonic shift is fueling the need for new cloud platforms that provide open services in a secure environment, powered by business grade capacity and supported with quality service. Companies are looking to a hybrid delivery model to ensure the flexibility and scale that is required to capitalize on these trends.
In his General Session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Dan Baigent, Sr. Director Business Development, HP Cloud Services, will share the company’s vision and strategy behind the HP Converged Cloud and the implications for the enterprise. He’ll discuss how some of HP’s customers today are taking advantage of the cloud including how simple it is to introduce a public cloud into a private cloud environment.

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Is SAML All You Need to Offer Business Customers SaaS Single Sign-on?

Single sign-on is essential to driving engagement and usage of SaaS applications in large and mid-sized customer organizations. SAML is often promoted as an industry standard in the area, but is it really the de facto standard a SaaS vendor needs to drive growth?
No.
SAML is a protocol, a language. Languages are great for communicating, but a certain language is only useful when communicating with other speakers of the same language.
In business, the value of a language is dependent on how big a share of your current and potential customers speak it. Your choice of language(s) can greatly affect what kind of business you can expect: doing business only in Finnish limits your market to 5 Million people, whereas English lets you address more than a Billion people. You have three options.

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Scyld Cloud Management Platform Moves HPC Applications to the Cloud

Image representing Penguin Computing as depict...Penguin Computing today announced the availability of the Scyld Cloud Management Platform (SCMP) on its public HPC cloud Penguin Computing on Demand (POD). SCMP is a comprehensive software suite that makes it easy to implement service-based on-demand access for HPC applications. SCMP provides services for:

  • web-based user sign-up and account management
  • generating detailed resource usage reports
  • provisioning and managing of virtual servers
  • instantly allocating storage
  • managing users and user groups

SCMP’s storage system is based on the distributed open-source storage system Ceph, which supports file-based, block-based and object-based storage. The management of virtual servers leverages OpenStack, an open-source solution for creating and managing large groups of virtual servers in a cloud computing environment. All SCMP components are accessible through an intuitive web-based interface, as well as a web-service API.

“As the first organization to offer commercial cluster management solutions for HPC and as one of the first to offer a public HPC cloud, we have a solid foundation on which we built SCMP,” says Tom Coull, Senior VP of Software and Services at Penguin Computing.

SCMP is also the foundation of Penguin Computing’s upcoming Scyld Cloud Manager (SCM), a packaged software suite that will enable customers to build their own public and private HPC clouds.

An early adopter of SCMP is the global biotechnology company Life Technologies. The Scyld Cloud Management Platform has enabled Life Technologies to offer cloud-based genomic sequencing analysis services through its Torrent Suite Cloud offering.

“SCMP is the core component of our Torrent Suite Cloud infrastructure,” says Matt Dyer, associate director of Bioinformatics at Life Technologies. “It enables us to offer a flexible solution for processing and managing genomic sequencing data to our customers. Typical use cases include software development and testing, as well as data sharing in collaborative projects.”


The API: From Hypertext to Hyperdata

The web has gone from integration via hypertext to integration via hyperdata.
A friend shared a recent C|Net article discussing the use of 404 error pages to feature missing children notices. Following links leads to a European effort to integrate information about missing children into 404 pages (and others, there’s no restriction that it be on a 404). By signing up, you’re offered some fairly standard HTML code to embed in the page. It’s very similar to advertising integration.
So I jumped on over to the US’ National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) hoping to find something similar or even better, an API. I was disappointed to find no real way to integrate the same data – not even simple dynamic HTML. All that data – all those children – are missing out on opportunities for exposure. Exposure that might mean being found.

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Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Executing Enterprise Clouds

Traditionally, IT departments have organized their processes, employees, and business relationships around owning and operating the core IT assets. The introduction of cloud services can offer significant cost savings and operational efficiencies but to recognize these benefits, IT departments will have to integrate new ways of thinking about how IT resources are delivered.
In his General Session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Jim Anthony, Vice-President of the Tier II Solution Architecture Team at Terremark, will discuss the major factors driving cloud adoption for the enterprise, relate how the adoption of cloud technologies is changing the way IT departments will operate, and review case studies about businesses that have successfully used cloud services to meet their business goals.

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RAMP Gets Patent on Automated Content Tagging

RAMP announced today that it has been issued its 19th patent as part of its ongoing development of intellectual property. USPN 8,280,719 covers RAMP’s unique ability to automatically tag large catalogs of audio, video, text, and image content using natural language processing combined with human guidance to create self-learning algorithms.

This technology enables RAMP to build highly scalable and cost-effective solutions for automatic content tagging – one of the most difficult and important challenges facing content producers across media and enterprise. Inadequate or incomplete tagging of content negatively impacts the performance of content management systems, adservers, and recommendation engines, and results in content that fails to generate its maximum value. USPN 8,280,719 nicely complements RAMP’s unique, patented ability to generate automated transcripts on audio and video content delivering a complete metadata solution for publishers of all content types.

“This recent patent issuance is a real testament to the deep talent and skill of the RAMP team,” said Tom Wilde, RAMP CEO. “We work hard to develop innovative ways for content producers to maximize the value of their content, and this patent is another great example of RAMP’s capabilities.”


OpenNebula 3.8 Beta Cloud Management Platform Is Out

The OpenNebula Project has just announced a new release, OpenNebula 3.8 Beta (Twin Jet), of its fully open-source, widely-used cloud platform for managing a data center’s virtual infrastructure. As in previous releases, the software brings countless valuable contributions from many industry, research and academia members of its large user community. Twin Jet brings many new features cloud management and stabilizes features that were introduced in previous versions.
OpenNebula is fully open-source software distributed and licensed for use under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0. An important effort has been made to synchronize the packaging format used by the OpenNebula project and those used by the Linux distributions. This will make even more easier to get and set OpenNebula up and running. Binary packages are available for the main Linux distributions.

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